Thomas Pettus (1712-1780)

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Nearby stood the home of Thomas Pettus, vestryman of Cumberland Parish (1758-1779) and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (1769-1775) and the Virginia House of Delegates (1777-1778). After royal governor Lord Dunmore dissolved the General Assembly on 26 May 1774, Pettus was among 89 former burgesses who met at the Raleigh Tavern the next day. The participants pledged to boycott most goods imported by the British East India Company and called for a congress of the colonies. Pettus also attended Virginia's first Revolutionary Convention in Aug. 1774, which elected delegates to the First Continental Congress and resolved to cease trade with Britain if grievances were not redressed.

Department of Historic Resources, 2018

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Landon C. Bell, Cumberland Parish: Lunenburg County, Virginia 1746-1816; Vestry Book 1746-1816 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1974 (reprint). Landon C. Bell, The Old Free State (Richmond: The William Byrd Press, Inc., 1927). William Walker Pettus IV, Thomas Petyous of Norwich, England, and His Pettus Descendants in England and Virginia, vol. I (Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2011). Virginia Gazette, 21 June 1780. Journals of the House of Burgesses, 1766-1776. Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia (Richmond, 1978). William J. Van Schreeven, comp., and Robert L. Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia, The Road to Independence, vol. 1 (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1975). Richard R. Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).